Falling Skies: "Reunion"Review

This being the penultimate episode of Falling Skies it was expected that there would be a lot of ground to cover in order to set up next week’s series finale. “Reunion” does have a lot of content but there are a couple of surprising variable thrown in that take up a lot of time and ultimately this episode doesn’t feel like it gains much ground on what was already established up to this point. That leaves the finale, “Reborn”, with a lot to wrap up in just under 50 minutes.

Let’s start with a couple of the surprising new variables thrown in the mix. Lexi’s return was the big one. With everything else that needs to happen in these final two episodes Lexi’s sudden appearance felt like a big distraction at first. However, she’s woven in the existing storyline quite well and handled by the characters with the right amount of skepticism considering what they went through with Katie Marshall last week. While Matt was a little on the emotional side when it came to wanting to believe that this Lexi was the genuine article, everyone else maintained a healthy amount of skepticism.

It was particularly impressive, albeit not that surprising, to see Anne maintain her composure when dealing with whatever was pretending to be Lexi. If Lexi had been thrown into the mix closer to the beginning of the season we may have had to endure three or four episodes with people believing she was real while others disagreed. With it being so close to the endgame, these characters honestly have no time for happy reunions. That made for some tighter writing, which makes for better storytelling. Having Lexi turn out to be a fake wrapped up the story in a nice neat little package before the end of the episode. She also added enough new information to give her presence some value, which is important considering how little time there is.

The other huge variable this week was the return of the Dornia with a neatly packaged device that will magically solve all of Earth’s problems by single handedly wiping out the Espheni threat. At this point I’m not going to outright call this magic bullet a deus ex machina yet since we haven’t seen it outright solve all of Earth’s problems just yet, but it’s set up to do just that. It seems the Dornia have been sitting on this magic bullet (the episode refers to it as that at one point) and waiting for the right time to strike at the Queen of the Overlords. We can only assume that’s why this device that can end the Espheni wasn’t offered up early.

Yes, it’s really unfortunate that we’re seeing something like this introduced magically out of nowhere, but is it really unexpected? We’re late in the game and we haven’t seen anything from the human resistance that suggested they would be able to end the threat once and for all. This solves that problem quite cleanly. I’m almost hoping it doesn’t work and that the threat is ended by human means instead of a last second Hail Mary via an alien race that was only introduced at the end of last season.

Also, the way this device is used looks rather ridiculous. You throw it at your enemy and some living organism/virus thing reaches out and does the killing. At least that’s how it looked when it was used on Lexi.

Then there’s Pope. Oh boy, Pope’s plan to catch Tom Mason off guard came off as hilariously bad. I swear he had a lot more people with him at the end of last week’s episode. His crew here consisted of what seemed like a handful of people. Part of me is hoping this whole thing is part of a large plan and Pope really isn’t dead, I’m assuming as much, but there is another part of me that thinks this show doesn’t have enough time to address both Pope and the Espheni queen in roughly 48 minutes next week. That’s too much ground to cover in too little time.

As it stands now, Pope’s death looks ridiculous. He’s crushed by falling debris by Dan and Tom who explode some barrels filled with gasoline. As an aside, am I the only one who was looking at the red barrels and just assuming they would be the better ones to shoot because of years of playing video games? For some reason, the black ones were the exploding barrels here, which was neatly setup at the start of the episode.

Anthony deciding he wasn’t a bad guy anymore was also hilarious. Again, part of me is kind of hoping that this is some sort of fake out and it feels like it’s set up for Anthony and Pope to show up guns blazing next week. If there wasn’t only one episode left I would assume as much but with less than an hour of content to go Pope’s return would be a big distraction at this point. They really should have wrapped his story up properly earlier in the season.

The one big thing here is that there is no body. Chances are Pope is coming back. That’s usually what happens when there is no body. It’s frustrating because they should have made it a point to find his body. With how vigilante Tom is being in regards to this final strike I would imagine he would want to leave no stone unturned that could jeopardize his mission.

So we have one of two situations left. Either Pope really did die anticlimactically and Anthony did suddenly have a restoration of sanity, both of which are lazy and sloppy, or something is up and it will need to be resolved next week. I think a lot of people will lean towards the latter simply because there is no body and it feels like a terrible resolution to Pope’s story to leave things the way they are. If that’s the case, it’s going to be interesting to see how the juggle Pope and Tom’s final push to save humanity next week.

While all of this is going on, Ben has been destroying himself trying to gain intelligence from the Espheni probe. It's good to see Ben with something interesting to do as I think he's been underutilized this season. Connor Jessup's performance stood out as well. He handled Ben's deterioration well while also highlighting Ben's strength and commitment to ending the war once and for all.

Then there is the sudden appearance of an armada of giant flying bugs to end the episode. I’m not going to worry about those. With everything else going on they’re the least of anyone’s problems.

The Verdict

"Reunion" concludes with a lot of questions still left unanswered. That leaves the series finale with a lot to do and very little time. This is a good episode but it feels like tighter planning from the start of the season would have left them with more room to deal with the amount of stories at play right now.